THE HONESTY OF STRICT JOY: WIND BACK WEDNESDAY IN A SWELL SEASON

This Friday, after a break of some 16 years, the pairing of Czech Marketa Irglova and Irishman Glen Hansard – a combination initially nameless beyond being them from the Academy Award-winning Once, then officially as The Swell Season – return with a new record, their third, called Forward.

You’ll be able to read an interview with them here,in two parts from tomorrow, but while you wait, it’s a good idea to go back a bit – well, 16 years – to the second album from The Swell Season, when the flush of initial success saw them in a world both sobering and inviting.

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THE SWELL SEASON

Strict Joy (Spunk/EMI)

THE FIRST, SELF-TITLED, The Swell Season album was essentially the two-hander soundtrack to Once, the little $2.50 film that could. On screen Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova played two lost souls connecting via music; on record the quietly romantic film became songs about reaching out for, dancing around and then succumbing to an idea of love, one which did not require hearts and flowers and consummation to be real.

That Hansard and Irglova, he an Irishman in his late-30s, she a Czech émigré barely into her 20s, did fall in love during the making of Once was not surprising but also irrelevant. Those songs felt touched by something true, whatever the circumstances. Likewise, the revelation when the pair performed at the Sydney Festival that they had split during the previous year seemed to have no impact at all on their on-stage connection during several rapturously received performances.

That connection is all the more obvious and also astonishing on this second album which is about what happens after the affair ends but love - confused, battered but not crushed - remains. It is frank and direct, a very public examination of what was right and what could not be set right no matter how deep the feeling.

Hansard begins the album by saying, in his typically urgent manner, "I want to sit you down and talk/I want to pull back the veils/and find out what it is I've done wrong" and later in the album snaps "And I wish you'd quit muttering/beneath your breath/it's killing me/you've not said nothing yet".

In I Have Loved You Wrong, Irglova sings “Forgive me lover/for I have sinned/For I have let you go” and in the complex Fantasy Man adds “And if everything is measured by the hole it leaves behind/Then this mountain has been levelled”.

 Of course it’s not at all clear which one of the two is the “I” in most of these songs and which the “you”. And it doesn’t matter because it is not anger or an individual which drives them in the end; rather it is a wish to repair and reclaim that which lies deeper, that which was a “journey out of sync” not one without reason. “Let’s put it down to life/The story of two lovers/Who danced both edges of the knife”.

If the emotional landscape of Strict Joy will challenge those who swooned over Once, the musical landscape may also surprise. It is a fuller sounding, band-emphasised collection, with a more muscular underpinning courtesy of most of the Frames, Hansard’s long time group.

The result is a repositioning of The Swell Season somewhere between Blue Nile’s stately soul (most obviously on Low Rising), the kind of adult pop to which Coldplay once aspired, and the passionate rock which is the Frames' specialty. To that can be added a more pronounced folk feel occasionally which tantalises with more possibilities for next time.

For now though, there’s a really satisfying, truthful, record to be enjoyed.

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